My friend Ellen’s birthday is the day before Halloween. I never remember until the day after Halloween. No one does, she tells me. She doesn’t mind, though. She knows that if she wants a celebration, the people who love her will be happy to have one. But she’d just as soon let the holiday happen and have, at most, a quiet dinner with her grown daughters and their partners.

My mother, on the other hand, who was born on Christmas Day, always resented sharing her birthday with a divine being. The time my brother, father, and I forgot to put birthday cards on her gifts, she fled into the bedroom and threw herself on her bed, crying. I was 8 and consumed by guilt and shame. I panicked that we had failed her and she’d be inconsolable.

Unlike my friend, my mother had always felt cheated. For good reason, I would understand later: an impoverished childhood, a father who drank too much, a mother who birthed 10 children and lost six. It didn’t help that she’d married at 17 and became a widow at 26, with two children to support and no good way to do that. It took my mother’s great strength and determination to make a good life.........

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